


Surprise Asshole! Supernatural's Been Queer This Whole Time

by jujubiest



Series: SPN On The Road Metas [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Analysis, Essays, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 02:00:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29235714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: A brief meta on Supernatural's origins in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and why queering Supernatural is an act of reclamation, not just transformation.
Series: SPN On The Road Metas [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2146764
Kudos: 6





	Surprise Asshole! Supernatural's Been Queer This Whole Time

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a tumblr rant. Something about Dean being the main character when he wasn't supposed to be and Cas being the endgame love interest when he wasn't supposed to be, and Dean being bi when he wasn't supposed to be and the story being queer when it wasn't supposed to be...and just the irrepressible power of queerness and queer identity and queer stories and queer love taking this hypermasculine power fantasy and turning it into a queer love story despite the network's best efforts.
> 
> All their token background queers and their bury your gays and their white picket fence heterosexual ending and their endless fucking attempts to give us some palatable watered-down backup singer version of queerness that would let them keep the toxic manly-man b.s. intact and we said NO, FUCKER. This story is queer this story is ours your red-blooded American hero-man is QUEER in fact the archetype he's based on is QUEER TOO and you can't do shit ABOUT IT.
> 
> And now by request I'm going to put this and all related metas onto AO3 in a series.

A lot of the reactions to Supernatural's finale have been along the lines of "make the story ours now." As though we need to steal the canon from the creators in order to fix their many and egregious mistakes, especially regarding the treatment of Dean Winchester's sexuality and his relationship to Castiel (but also, in general, the overwhelming cookie-cutter flatness and erasure in the endings for _all_ _three_ main characters.

**When we insist that Supernatural is a queer text, we are not taking something _from_ the likes of Kripke and Singer and the C*W. We are taking something _back_ that they stole from us.**

It’s an act of reclamation, not interpretation. We are not queering the text, we are not teasing out subtext. We are looking at a bland, straightwashed bastardization of an already queer text and saying fuck you, this was _always_ ours. We are excavating the echoes of us, and of queerness, in the source material that they tried and failed to bury.

Dean Winchester is inspired by/based on Dean Moriarty, a bisexual fictional character written by a bisexual* author and based on his bisexual friend/lover, Neal Cassady. Eric Kripke has openly stated this as the inspiration for the character, and _On The Road_ in general as a major inspiration for the show.

Sam Winchester is inspired by/based on Sal Paradise, aforementioned bisexual author Jack Kerouac's self-insert. Eric Kripke has openly stated this as well.

In terms of where he fits in the story and what he means to Dean, Castiel is arguably Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady’s real-life lover on and off for nearly 20 years. I _truly_ believe that part to be purely by accident because I can almost guarantee you that Eric Kripke ~~pretends the uncensored scroll of On The Road doesn’t exist and~~ never intended Castiel and Dean to be what they are for a single second. But on some level it barely matters, because the _intentional_ and _stated_ inspiration for Castiel is John Constantine, a bisexual DC Comics character.

So on the one hand, Kripke openly admits to the inspiration for Castiel being queer. And on the other hand, Allen Ginsberg _is_ to Neal Cassady what Castiel is to Dean Winchester (see the second part of this series for more on that).

The important point is this: Supernatural is a straight man’s attempt to take the sweeping, epic, lonely and desolate aesthetics and themes of 1940s-50s Americana _as seen and described and experienced through the eyes of queer men of the time_ and turn it into an early 21st century straight male power fantasy which makes monsters of anyone who might be seen as Other.

It’s no accident that the first two queer people we ever meet in the show are a vampire (a creature whose sexuality is inextricably tied with death and corruption of innocence throughout vampire lore) in season 1 and a girl whose touch _literally brings death to her lover_ in season 2. (”The very touch of you corrupts” anyone?)

Supernatural is the story of a few small, mean, unimaginative little men trying to straightwash the archetypal American man so they could stand in his skin and claim he always belonged to them, and queer viewers dragging them out of that holy place and saying "NO, this story is ours and you do NOT get to steal it from us."

This is why so many queer fans have been saying, over and over, that this is not about a ship, that this is so far _beyond_ a ship and always has been. The straightwashing of queer characters in media is an act of homophobic erasure. The repurposing of queer stories to uphold straight toxic masculinity and its attendant power fantasies is an act of homophobic erasure. The decade-plus of queerbaiting and gaslighting queer fans and calling us delusional for seeing what was _always there_ is an act of homophobic violence.

Reading these characters and stories as queer anyway is an act of reclamation, of recognizing the roots and DNA the veneer of heteronormativity tried so hard to hide.

And there _is no_ argument to be made for these characters--Dean and Cas in particular--as heterosexual that does not ultimately reinforce or perpetuate the initial straightwashing and the underlining homophobia that prompted it. Fans participating in this are perpetuating homophobic violence, however much they try to trivialize it as ship wars or dress it up as edgy storytelling.

**Author's Note:**

> * In this and other essays in this series, the label "bisexual" is frequently used as an umbrella term to describe individuals in real life or fiction who had romantic and sexual relationships with and expressed desire for more than one gender, but who did not necessarily label themselves with a particular label that we would use or understand in the same way today. Likewise, the term "queer" is frequently used as an umbrella term to describe marginalized sexual and romantic orientations and gender identities, as well as to discuss concepts within queer studies and queer theory. Neither should be considered an assertion of any individual's absolute labels.


End file.
